


barycenter

by CopperCaravan



Series: Flight [2]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: (yes folks you read that right: twenty pages of unresolved romance), AU, Alternate Universe, F/M, Fera Shepard, Friends to Lovers, Moreau Family - Freeform, Unresolved Romantic Tension, eventually
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-28
Updated: 2016-07-28
Packaged: 2018-07-27 08:34:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7611088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CopperCaravan/pseuds/CopperCaravan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Part of my Flight School AU; Jeff and Shepard piloting the Normandy, Jeff and Shepard making each other extremely concerned, Jeff and Shepard being best friends who are actually just losers in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	barycenter

**Author's Note:**

> Couple things: references to Mindoir, sometimes moderately graphic. AU where Kaidan's the spectre and people actually *want* Shepard to drive the mako (if you don't know: the Flight AU is me tossing Shepard and Jeff into the Academy together to both be pilots because I am Emotional). I named Jeff's parents Tessa and Marc. I proof-read this sucker like five times but if (when) you find typos, please let me know. It took too long for me to let it have typos.

Shepard’s gonna give him ulcers.

She’s been like this since flight school, so maybe he ought to be used to it, but he isn’t: she’s got this habit of _helping._ It pretty much always involves her running straight into danger.

When she was in the Terminus Systems, even in the Traverse, she got herself into plenty of trouble, but he didn’t hear about it until later, when everything was already ok again.

_Jeff, you are not gonna believe what I just did._

_Got into a shoot-out with a heavy today! Almost lost the ship but we won!_

_Did you know that ‘igniting an atmosphere’ is a real thing you can do?_

It’s always the same short fight, too:

“You’re a pilot, Shepard, not a damn marine.”

“I have to help, Jeff.”

And she always does. She’s got so many stamps on her record for lack of decorum, disrespect of rank, insubordination, just flat out being stubborn, that the only thing even keeping her from being slapped on a rack is that every time she does something stupid, she ends up doing something great. She was practically an Alliance Poster Child even before Elysium and _after_ Elysium, what’d they do? Send her to N7, treat her like she _is_ a marine. Like she’s a brand to stamp on their posters, like she’s a great soldier, but a disposable soldier.

And sure, the Alliance treats all of them as disposable; that’s what a military is. But she’s Shepard, and she’s not disposable, and Jeff can’t understand why he’s the only one to act like it.

Anderson, at least, is on his side. For now. But Shepard’s good at getting her way. Some people call it _charm._ But those people are dumbasses; she’s just stubborn.

After she’s been pacing up and down the bridge for the better half of an hour, Jeff sticks his hand in the air and points at her seat. He’s betting this whole ‘listening to him’ thing isn’t gonna last real long, but if he can get her to just _sit still,_ he’ll take it as a win.

“How many times did I tell you, Shepard? You already have a job; focus on _that._ ”

He can’t stop her from going groundside—not if she gets the go-ahead from a higher-up—because she’s his co-pilot; she’s not technically under him. Not that she’s _under_ him in any sense, not like—

“You know,” she says, dropping into her seat, eyes still sharp on the ground team’s vitals, “we didn’t all get a free pass on ‘Soldier 101.’”

Anybody else and the implication would sting but with Shepard, things are different. For one thing, she knows the difference between ‘ok’ and ‘not fucking ok’ just like he does. If anything, he’s the one who pushes his luck sometimes, and she never takes his shit; it’s something he’s always loved about her. For another thing, she’s about as good at bottling up her feelings as his mom is: not at all.

“Didn’t have to spend all that extra time on it, though,” he fires back. And god, he’d been so _bored_ too; she’s out flinging shit all over the place with her fancy blue superpowers and he’s stuck studying by himself, waiting on her to come back. Paid off at graduation, though, when he beat her out. ‘Course, she ruined his smug mood by being all genuine and congratulatory and junk. “Sure as hell don’t have to leap into every fire that happens to be in the same star system as you.” He starts counting on his fingers just to make his point, not that she’s gonna listen. “Didn’t have to go all heroic on all those runs in the Terminus Systems. Didn’t have to pull that shit on Elysium. Didn’t have to accept that N7 recommendation. Didn’t have to—”

“I had to help, Jeff.”

Like a broken fucking record. “You can _help_ by doing your actual job. Y’know, _piloting._ On the ship. Where you belong.”

“With you?” She says it so casually that he almost says _yes, with me; of course, with me_. And she might’ve meant it—he’d have meant it—but she might not have.

“Where it’s a lot harder for people to kill you,” he says instead, because it’s true.

“You’re just mad that Gunny thinks I’m cooler than you.”

They both know that’s not it. Or at least, Jeff hopes she knows. Either way: “She does not. You get a couple extra ‘I miss you’ emails and you think you’re hot shit, but let me tell you something, alright. Gunny didn’t—”

“We need evac immediately.” Jeff doesn’t recognize the voice over the radio, not that that matters much. Shepard’s already out of her seat, cursing and running toward the stairs to the shuttle. “I repeat,” the woman continues, “CO is injured; Beacon acquired. We need evac.”

Well, they’d _almost_ made it through their first run together. They’d _almost_ been just fine without her on the ground, getting shot at. Almost.

He sighs. Shepard’s gonna be fucking impossible now.

~

Part of it is that they’ve never partnered up before, either of them. Not for real. And Shepard’s just not good at being PM; she wants to _fly,_ or to _fight,_ or to just do _something_. She’s already missing the adrenaline of chasing down slavers; those guys don’t give up easy.

But the other part of it—the bigger part of it—is two dead fresh off the Normandy, Williams’ whole team, and Kaidan out cold in the med bay.

It’s bullshit. And she should’ve been down there to help.

_Protocol,_ they’d said. Like it’s proper protocol to employ a ship-thief, but it’d just be absurd to send an N7-trained pilot with the ground team.

“Don’t sulk, Shepard.”

She has to remind herself that it’s not Jeff’s fault. Even if he’d backed her up, Anderson wouldn’t have let her go. But the thing is, he didn’t and he should have.

“I’m not sulking, you asshole.”

“Yes, you are. There’s nothing you could’ve done.” Platitudes are the fucking worst and he, of all people, knows that.

“I could’ve done something if I hadn’t been stuck on the ship waiting,” she says. They at least could’ve let her take the shuttle to cover them.

“You’ve got your hands full being my co-pilot,” he says.

“You know, Jeff, you’re _my_ co-pilot too. Hijacking military property doesn’t give you any official seniority here.”

“Sorry, Shepard, I can’t quite hear you over the sound of me announcing the jump.”

“I _said_ —”

He smirks at her and presses the comm. “Approaching relay; prepare for jump in 3-2...”

~

Forty-six. That’s how many copies of the same key are spread out across the Milky Way.

There are twelve on the Citadel: a few in the bottom of lost-and-found boxes in the backrooms of stores, two dropped in the vents at a bar, one found by an asari child who hung it around her neck on a piece of string.

There are four on Arcturus Station: one left at the pool and kept in a drawer in the lifeguard office, three in Tessa Moreau’s apartments (one lost in Shepard’s room, one on Mrs. Moreau’s keychain, and one inexplicably in the bottom of a decorative vase that no one’s touched since it was put there).

There are ten floating around in the Terminus Systems: in repossessed slaver ships, crashed slaver ships, a slaver ship that was later recycled into a legitimate hauling freight, and shoved into the console of the ship Shepard was piloting before she boarded the Normandy. It was a small thing, made for speed rather than combat, and the CO called it Medusa.

There are nineteen on Tiptree: one kept securely in Marc Moreau’s pocket, the rest lost to the depths of the couch cushions, left on the counter and hung on a hook and forever overlooked, dropped into the ploughed fields like seedlings, tossed in the dryer with jeans and flannels, in a jar in Hilary’s room with pens and pencils and a tiny troll doll with fierce blue hair.

They all belonged to Shepard. There is one in Shepard’s pocket and it belongs to Jeff.

“What? Where the hell’s _your_ key?”

“I left it at home.”

“ _Why?_ ”

“Well maybe because my jackass— _you_ —texted me at 3 AM and I was in kind of a hurry. Just give me your key, Jeff.”

“Just remember to make yourself another copy, please.”

So there will soon be forty- _seven_ copies of the same key spread across the Milky Way.

The door it opens isn’t all that impressive, really: a small apartment in Bachjret Ward, with only two rooms—the bathroom, which is hardly large enough to call a ‘room’ at all, and the kitchen-den-bedroom, where all significant furniture has been shoved into one of three corners.

Jeff and Shepard have shared this apartment for going on six years and have barely spent even a week there together, and never all at once. She’d wanted it because she’d wanted _something._ Tiptree may be her home—her second home, the only one left—but she’d needed something that was _hers_ between runs on the Medusa, somewhere to keep her stuff, what little she had, and somewhere to rest that wasn’t a different hotel room every time.

And, simply, Jeff sucks at saying ‘no’ to her.

And because she was stuck on the ship during one of the most important discoveries of the history of humankind in space, she’s got a couple hours free while Kaidan and Anderson meet with the Council. She wants to nap on the couch.

That, and she didn’t pack enough clothes and Jeff refuses to loan out any more of his t-shirts.

~

Dammit.

Fucking goddamn _shit,_ she did it.

The second Kaidan gave her an order and she answered him with finger guns, Jeff _knew_ she was gonna get her way and she did.

“Jeff won’t need me,” she’d said. “He’ll handle the ship and I can handle the mako.”

“It’s better than going alone,” she’d said. “Come on, Commander, I’ve got the training!”

“You know my record,” she’d said. “I can _help_ , Kaidan.”

_Charming,_ they used to call her. The professors and the pilots and the other students. _Charming._ A god damn menace. That’s what she is.

Deep breaths. Deep breaths. Goddammit. Deep breaths.

“Shepard.” He doesn’t even look at her, can’t stand it, her behind his chair, geared up and ready to go groundside in some creepy Prothean dig site. That stupid N7 plastered over her chest like it’s a good thing and not a death sentence, not a damn countdown.

“Hm?”

_You’re a pilot. You’re not supposed to be doing all this shit you do. You’re supposed to be sitting here. Piloting._ “Keep our channel open.”

“Why?” _Why._ “Kaidan’ll have contact with the Normandy; you don’t need me—”

“Can you just make my life easy for once? Keep our damn radio channel open.” He still doesn’t turn around to look at her. Doesn’t want the last thing he sees to be that stupid N7, doesn’t wanna think about how angry he sounds and how excited she is about throwing herself in the line of fire. Fuck’s sake, there’s ‘self-sacrificing’ and then, five notches above that, there’s Shepard, giving him ulcers. She’s not gonna die— _she’s not, she can’t, she won’t_ —not from some fetch run like this, geth and evil asari be damned. She’s done plenty of life-threatening shit and she’s come back every time but _god_ why’s she got to keep on doing it? He knows why, he does, but can’t she just...

“Aww, Jeff. Are you _worried_? That’s so sw—”

“Don’t. Do _not._ Just go.”

~

Jeff and Shepard aren’t lovers.

Maybe it’s just because they’ve know each other so long, or because they know each other so well, or... just because, but people ask them that a lot.

Shopping? “Is this for your partner? I’m sure they’ll love it!” And Jeff always says, “Oh, uh, no. I mean, she’s been wanting one of these but we’re not—she isn’t—it’s not, uh...”

Sight-seeing? “Oh, you two are so cute together! Humans always seem so fickle, but you two look like you were made for each other!” And Jeff always says, “No, we’re not... Wait, what?”

Home for the holidays? “Jeff, when are you and Shep gonna have a baby, already?” And Jeff always spits out his drink and says, “Jesus, Gunny, we aren’t having a baby! What in the—who told you that?”

Things could be that way, maybe, and maybe they should be that way; he’d _like_ for them to be.

It’s just that it’s not like they’ve ever talked about it, not _really_. There was that one time, way back when they were still at the Academy. And that other time, a few months back, at the apartment...

There are _two_ keys on his key ring now. His. And Shepard’s.

She’d tossed his keychain back to him after her little fieldtrip and he’d just sort of looked at her; she called it his trademark _are you stupid #5_ look and he’d paused for a second to wonder how many she’d catalogued. “Why do—Shepard. If I’m just gonna keep your key, what’s the point of you even having one?”

“Well, _Mr. Responsibility,_ ” she’d said, trying to imitate his expression and mostly just managing to look silly (which, despite his mood, made him grin). “You really want me to shove it into the pocket of my uniform? Never to be seen again?”

Fair enough point. And the truth is, she’s just as likely to lose a keychain as she is to lose a key (so: _very_ ) but still, here he is.

“Can I help you, Sir?”

He drops the keychain on the counter—a real corny one, stupid little rocket ship with _space is the place_ written across it. It’s so dumb and touristy; Shepard’ll love it.

“Yeah, just, uh, this thing.”

~

Therum had terrified him, really. Not the place, not the job, just knowing she was down there and he couldn’t do anything to help her if something went wrong.

And plenty went wrong, if you count lots of creepy geth, a heat one hazard level, a fucking colossus, an angry krogan, and a goddamn earthquake, which apparently, Shepard doesn’t.

“You kidding, Jeff? That was one of the smoothest runs I’ve had this last year,” she’d said, like that was supposed to make him feel _better_ and not just make him worry retroactively about all the crap she’d done out in the Traverse and the Terminus Systems. “And it was fun, too.”

Great. _Great._ Really.

He’s used to being in constant contact with a CO on the ground; he’s used to listening to things go one way or the other and keeping his hands busy while he waits so the anxiety doesn’t get at him. He’s not used to it being _Shepard._

And he’s still not real sure if he’d rather listen in while she’s on the ground or if he’d just rather to go back to the _text me when you’re done risking your life so I can pretend it didn’t happen_ system. Because that seemed to work real well for them, you know, relatively, and this doesn’t seem to work real well for them at all.

“Shepard? What’s going on down there?”

Mostly, things are silent but he can hear some shuffling and the muffled patter of gunfire, those frustrated sounds she makes—something between grunting and cursing. What he doesn’t hear is an answer.

“Shepard. What the hell are you doing?”

“ _Shut up,_ Jeff. I’m trying to not freeze my ass off out here.”

“You’re _shooting,_ ” he says. “I can hear the guns.”

Another grunt, a few more shots. “If you know— _shit_ —if you know what I’m doing then stop asking.”

“I gotta say, Shepard, for the sake of workplace harmony: I’m sensing a bit of a tone issue, here.”

“I’ll— _ow,_ fuck—I’ll show you a tone issue,” she says and he doesn’t mean to laugh, he’s just so goddamn nervous. “Now shut up. You’re distracting me.”

He presses his fingers into his temples, shuts his eyes for a while and just listens to her breathing and cursing and shooting and cursing some more. By the time they get to the center of the complex, Jeff’s somewhere between an all-out anxiety attack and laughing his ass off at her ridiculous commentary. (“Fucking cold, Jeff, what’d you think? And everybody’s got a stick up their ass.” Definitely knocking _Noveria_ off their list of potential vacation spots.)

 “Shit. Shit, shit, _shit._ ”

“What? What is it? Shepard!”

Just more grunts and gunfire and voices that aren’t hers, yelling in the background. And then a _thump_ that makes his stomach drop, and a yell, and the very distinct sound of her not breathing.

“...fucking—fucking commandos—”

“Shepard? Shepard! Goddammit, what’s happening?”

“We didn’t—shit—we...”

He’s trained himself to be careful of his hands, but he’s so anxious and she’s mumbling and gasping like she can’t breathe and he can’t fucking _do_ anything but just sit here and _listen_ and he kicks his foot against the console and right before it connects, he realizes he’s fucked up.

~

“You should have told me!” Shepard yells, flinging her shirt onto the floor of the med bay. It’s been a while since she’s been this mad. It’s been a longer while since she’s been this mad _at Jeff._

“Yeah,” he says, tossing his hands up, and still trying to keep ahold of his crutch. “Because you woulda been _so much help_ from four damn jumps away!”

She’s got the _overwhelming_ urge to stomp her foot, or thump his. And she can feel her face going red, her hands balling into fists. “Don’t you blame this on me! I didn’t— _ah._ ”

Doc starts slathering on the anaesthetic and it’s _cold_ ; Shepard jerks away, which only makes it hurt worse. “Be still, Shepard. You’re making this much more difficult than it needs to be.”

“Yeah, Shepard,” Jeff says, and if her shirt wasn’t out of reach, she’d throw it at him.

“And _you,_ ” Chakwas says, pausing Shepard’s stitches to point at Jeff (needle in hand, which makes them both a little queasy). “Stop antagonizing her.”

“Yeah, Jeff.”

Doc sighs, heavily, and it reminds Shepard of M—of Jeff’s mom so much that she gets a little homesick. “It’s like raising toddlers,” Doc says.

Shepard just ignores that, tries to ignore the push and pull of the stitches going into her back too. “You should’ve been taking your meds! And you should’ve told me it was getting worse!”

He rolls his eyes and turns around—hops, really—so he’s facing the door. “It’s not a big deal; you know how this shit works.”

God, if it wouldn’t be completely counter-productive, she’d punch him right in the face. Before she boarded, they talked almost every day, and he didn’t think it was worth mentioning? Couldn’t slide it in there somewhere between _I hate this shit drop-off detail_ and _I stole that new prototype frigate_?

_VS sucks._

_I feel like shit._

_I’m not taking my meds because I’m getting depressed again even though I’m too goddamn stubborn to admit it, even to you, my best and truest friend who worries about me all the damn time._

That really so much to fucking ask?

“That’s not fair,” she yells. “First, you send me that bullshit text message and I have to explain to P—to your dad and Gunny that ‘yes, he did steal an Alliance vessel _technically_ but it’s fine; don’t worry about it if you see him on the news vids.’ Like did you really think we weren’t gonna _worry_?”

He starts to answer, but she cuts him off. “And _now_ I have to find out from Doc that you’re not even _trying_ to take care of yourself? That’s bullshit, Jeff!”

“ _Me_? Are you serious, Shepard?” He turns—hops—back around to face her and he’s red as a beet. It’d be funny if they weren’t both so damn mad. “ _You’re_ the one always running off into shit! _You’re_ the one who doesn’t take care of herself! Fuck’s sake you’re on a med table right now because you got fucking _shot_!”

“I have to help—”

“Fuck that.” And he leaves, cast foot barely skimming the floor.

She wants to go after him, not to apologize, but just—something. “You should let him cool off,” Doc says, and Shepard knows she’s right. Not that it much matters; she’s still got a few stitches to go.

~

After Elysium, the Alliance gave Shepard a month off. A _reward._

That alone had made her fighting mad.

But she’d taken it. She’d also taken a shitload of money out of her savings account, packed a bag, and made her way to a far corner of the wards where she’d used a false name to check herself into a crisis center.

M—Jeff’s mom. She’d been the last person to speak to Shepard before that; had practically begged Shepard to spend the month off on Arcturus with her, or to go home to Tiptree. She hadn’t outright said it, but Shepard knew she was worried. And there was plenty of reason to be, but Shepard promised everything was fine. At the time, it didn’t matter that it wasn’t true.

The Moreau’s love her. She knows that. She just didn’t want them to worry.

She didn’t tell anybody where she was, or why, and nobody—the Alliance, especially—ever found out. Except Jeff, much later. And even if he hadn’t, he knows everything else, certainly enough to know that when C-Sec has her paged back down to the dock, she can’t go alone even though it’s a literal pain for him to walk all the way back with her.

She just can’t do it.

“Sorry,” she says in the elevator. And she means it. She’s finally gotten him out of the ship and as soon as they get half-way across the commons—no small feat for him today, given the crutches—they have to turn right back around.

“You don’t have to apologize, Shepard.”

The fact that he means it just makes it worse. Jeff’s one of the few people she’s met who always knows just how far to push her when it comes to Mindoir. Hell if she knows _how_ he knows, but he does. There are people who call her _survivor_ , who commend her for her _strength_ and _perseverance_ and her _good spirit despite great adversity_ (that’s what they wrote on the plaque they gave her a few months after Elysium; she threw it in the trash) _._ And then there are people who look at her with the saddest faces she’s ever seen, who hand out pity like alms. She pretty much wants to punch all of them.

Jeff has, over the course of their friendship, managed to not be any of those people. Maybe it’s because they both have just a little more bitterness in them than is socially acceptable, or maybe it’s just because he’s used to the same sort of shit, or maybe it’s because he fucking pays attention. Either way, she’s always been grateful for that.

She is today too.

The girl hiding behind the loading crates is bone-thin and as pale as the fish her daddy used to pull in from the gulf.

Shepard can’t really make out what she’s saying—screaming sometimes, whimpering others—but she doesn’t need C-Sec to tell her what she’s already worked out for herself: this girl is from Mindoir. From before.

“I’ve got it,” she says. He offers to keep a careful aim with the tranquilizer gun, just in case, but Shepard tells him no. It isn’t his place. It’s not anybody’s, really, but it’s got to be somebody’s, so it’s got to be hers.

She takes slow steps—steps that even so many years later, she’s still not ready to take—and Jeff waits for her near the elevator with security. She can feel him watching her, can feel him worry. It’s not the same kind of worry other people give her—they don’t know her, they just know what happened. Hell, they don’t even really know that; they weren’t there. Everyone who was is dead. Or is long-gone, forgotten at a Batarian auction. Or is here, on this loading dock, afraid.

“I’m Shepard,” she says, still several feet away.

“They sent you to hurt me! They sent you to get me!” Her voice is quick and harsh, shallow with dehydration and panic. She can’t be much older than twenty, if that. The same age Shepard’s little brother would’ve been if he’d made it, one way or the other. Looking at this girl—Shepard has to face the fact that death might be preferable. Even thinking it, in the back of her mind, makes her sick.

“I’d never hurt you,” Shepard says. She’s surprised by her own voice, so much calmer than she actually is. It’s like she’s not even really in her body. “Will you tell me your name?”

~

Talitha.

She’s never gonna forget the name, never gonna forget the sunken cheeks and the scars and the way Talitha had looked at her when _Mindoir_ came out of her mouth. Recognition. Hope. Betrayal.

_You should’ve been there._ Mindoir. The slaver ships. The auctions. Somewhere, anywhere, everywhere. Shepard should have been where Talitha was.

When Jeff gets her back in the cockpit, he shuts the door. Locks it. God, she must look... she can feel the tears—the dampness on her face, yeah, but the way they make her head ache too. And that’s fine. It’s a normal reaction, she’s sure. Anybody would cry. She can even feel her biotics tingling along her skin, the precursor to a barrier she’s trying to diffuse before it materializes. She hasn’t had a problem controlling her biotics for years.

But she can’t stop laughing.

“It’s not funny,” she says, looking up at him from her seat. “I hate this. I hate—I can’t stop.”

“It’s ok, Shepard.” He puts his hands on her arms and she knows he can feel the static, the control slipping away from her. She wants to push him away—god, the last thing she needs to do is lose control with him, of all people, standing so close—but she can’t.

“It’s not!” She doesn’t sound the way she feels, just like she hadn’t sounded the way she felt on the dock. She’s angry. She’s terrified. She sounds hysterical. She sounds like she’s struggling to get through a really funny story. Like this is all some big fucking cosmic joke. Is this the kind of god her mother believed in?

The tears are starting to catch up with her too: she can’t get her breath and she can’t stop fucking hiccupping. “Jeff.” She looks at him, waits for the words to fall out, but there’s nothing. She doesn’t know—what she wants, or what she needs, or what she’s trying to ask him. There’s just nothing. Maybe that’s what she wants, for him to tell her how to feel, how to act. He’s the only one she’d trust to do it.

She shakes her head, slaps her hands over her face to stifle the wild laughter. “I don’t know what to do.”

“You don’t have to do anything.”

Of course she doesn’t. Not now. What’s there left to do? If she’d done something back then though— _that’s_ when Talitha really needed her. That’s when her parents needed her, and her brothers. They _needed_ her. And she couldn’t _do_ anything.

He wraps his arms around her neck and pulls her face into his chest. It’s not comfortable—surely it isn’t comfortable for him either; it occurs to her that he really ought to _sit down_ —but fuck if she can’t do a goddamn thing about it except try to muffle her laughter against his shirt.

“They shouldn’t have called you,” he says. “It wasn’t fair to make you deal with that.”

And he’s right. She’s not a therapist. All those people who like to tell her that she’s _not dealing with her past,_ they’re fucking right. But it’s never been anybody else’s business. It’s _hers—_ her problems, her feelings, her memories—to deal with however the fuck she wants, however she can. Even if that means running the hell away from it all.

_That’s_ how Jeff’s always known what to say, what to do, how to help her: the two of them aren’t the right kind of _survivors_ , the right kind of _hero despite the odds._ They aren’t doing it the way everyone else wants them to.

“Nothing about any of it was fair,” she says. The words come out ragged, barely discernible amid all the breathless, hollow laughter.

There was no fairness to four bullets in Emiliano’s chest, or to both her parents heaped in a pile of limbs bent the wrong way and eyes open just a little too wide, or to Tully crying like the little boy he was and reaching for her and no way for her to help any of them.

There was no fairness to Talitha getting snatched up by slavers with guns and taken off to who knows how many auction blocks and who knows what kind of treatment while Shepard lay unconscious in a heap of bodies for two days, only to be rescued and hailed as a survivor.

There was no fairness to the Alliance doing fuck-all to get their people back, to blaming political red-tape and impossible odds for their inaction, and sending her, thirteen years too goddamn late, to help that scared little girl on the dock.

All these years she’s spent in the Terminus Systems and the Traverse, stopping smugglers and slavers and pirates, she’d felt like she was _doing_ something but she’s _not._ She’s crying in the cockpit of the Normandy. She’s laughing into Jeff’s shirt while he holds her as tightly as he can. She’s as helpless right now as she was when she was sixteen years old and everything in and around her was fucking dying.

~

By the time they get to Feros, an agreement—of sorts—has been reached.

Shepard keeps their radio channel on and he can mute it if he needs to. He won’t—of course he won’t—but he can. (He can’t—god, he can’t—but he could. In theory.)

Jeff takes his medications and makes a dedicated effort not to break his foot again (or anything else). He also has to do all the shitty pre-flight grunt work for the next two flights.

He gets to keep his chair, but she gets to be Player One for two weeks and “yes, that includes your dumb side-scroll platformer, Jeff. I’m tired of being the stupid turtle; I want to be the dog.”

Nobody apologizes. They’ve never been good at that, either of them, but especially not in cases like this where they’re both still so certain they’re right.

Jeff settles into his seat and runs his fingers over the stupid little rocket ship keychain he still hasn’t given her (because it’s stupid and it’s exactly the kind of thing she’d love but, god, it is just so _stupid_ ) and he listens to Shepard talk and laugh and curse and shoot and he breathes, breathes, breathes.

~

She looks like such a loser when she sleeps. Her mouth’s always a little open and when she forgets to put her hair up, it just gets everywhere. She’s looking especially ridiculous because she’s in the co-pilot’s seat, so she’s slumped over her armrest and one of her feet is still propped up on the console, barely.

And he’s a loser too, because he keeps looking over at her like it’s actually cute.

What happened was Shepard kissed him.

They almost never actually see each other at that apartment—their shore leave hardly ever lined up, they spent all their long holidays back home on Tiptree, it just didn’t work out real often that they were both there at the same time.

And then, one night last year, he’d stayed up too late watching crappy old movies and the door’d opened and he’d turned around and there she was. Smelled like a fucking bar, too.

And god, he’d stared like an idiot.

“Oh, Jeff. Hey. I didn’t know you were gonna be here tonight.”

He’d seen her in that dress before—hell, you don’t know somebody as long and as well as they do without seeing each other in a lot less than that—but it was just one of those moments. He couldn’t look away. Kinda like right now.

She stood there in the doorway for a minute, the light from the hallway silhouetting her like it was something poetic, and not just a blinky florescent in an apartment complex on a crowded street in Bachjret. Either way, she looked as beautiful as she always does and then she’d walked over to the couch and leaned down and just pressed her lips to his like it happened every day, like it was the most natural, familiar thing in the world. It kinda was.

And he hadn’t fucking moved.

He’s seen Shepard drunk a hundred times, but it’s hard to tell with her. You share a fridge with a biotic and you learn real quick how much food they can put away. Same goes for booze. Fuck’s sake, she barely even ever gets a hangover and if that’s not the universe playing favourites... But he hadn’t been out with her, had no idea how much she’d had to drink, so he panicked, sat still as stone for about thirty seconds before she’d pulled back and looked at him like math problem, grinned and thumped the brim of his hat, and then just fucking went to bed. Didn’t even change out of her dress.

Christ, he’d thought about it. Of course he had. He _does._ Him and her and just the whole thing. Them. It’s never been about not wanting her; there’s just always been _something_. Getting through the Academy. Enlisting. Assignments half a galaxy away from each other. Elysium. N7. And now _this—_ Saren and the geth and whatever the hell’s going on.

And he’s not that guy—the guy who makes out with his best friend while she’s drunk, because she’s drunk, whatever. He doesn’t want to be that guy with her.

And he doesn’t want her to see him as that guy either.

They haven’t talked about it. They could—they probably _should_ —he’s just not real sure what to say, which has never been a problem they’ve had before. Not about anything else, anyway.

~

It’s been a while since Shepard genuinely thought she was gonna die.

When those moments come, things always seem to just slow down.

Sometimes, she’d be lying in bed and all the despair and bitterness and exhaustion would just hit her and she’d think _I won’t make it_ and it was ok because she was so tired and the truth is, she missed the mark the first time, on Mindoir. She wasn’t supposed to live through that; she wonders if she really even did.

Sometimes, she’d been scared. She’d been scared on Elysium, when the whole thing had started. She’d thought _I don’t want to die_ and how the Alliance found a ‘hero’ in her is beyond reckoning because everything she’d done there, she’d cried through like a little girl. It was _Mindoir, Mindoir, Mindoir,_ and she was wrong all those other times, she wasn’t ready to die, not now, not here, not again.

Sometimes, like now, she’s _mad_. She’s let down so many people—her family, her friends, back on Mindoir; Talitha; every slave-to-be she hadn’t been able to catch on the Medusa, every one she’d just caught too late; every dead team member she couldn’t help—but there are still people counting on her. The crew _needs_ her. And there are people who want her to come _home_. She has one. It’s not the same, of course; Tiptree, the Moreau’s, could never replace Mindoir, could never replace the Shepard’s, but that doesn’t mean they don’t matter.

And she’ll be damned if a bunch of flashlight-faced bastards keep her or the crew or a single goddamn one of these salarians from going home. There aren’t a lot of times you can honestly promise yourself that kind of victory, but she’s _mad_ and she’s gonna do it today.

“Go get Ash,” she says into the radio. “That bomb is the priority and you know it, Kaidan.”

A pause. Kaidan wrestling with the decision, Jeff... waiting.

“I’m going to be _fine_ ,” she says. “If I can talk Wrex down, I can kill some extra geth. I’ve got plenty of back-up.”

Kaidan curses under his breath. “I’m sorry, Shepard.”

“Don’t gotta apologize to me, Commander.”

~

Another day and she might let Jeff sleep (probably not, but maybe). Today is about to get _real_ interesting though.

“Jeff. Wake up. Hey.” She gives his shoulder a little shake and tries not to laugh at him. He _insists_ he doesn’t snore, ever, at all. He’s wrong.

“What?”

“Get up; I got dibs on this one.”

“ _What_?” Well, he’s awake now. “Normandy’s grounded. And you can’t have my chair.”

“Yeah, well, you already got to steal the ship; it’s my turn this time.”

“What the shit are you talking about, Shepard?”

She shoves at his shoulders ‘til he’s up, muttering, and hopping over to the co-pilot’s seat. Foot’s _almost_ healed, at least. “The Council grounded us,” she says.

“Yes.”

She passes him the pre-flight checks and starts setting the nav. “The Council’s being dumb.”

“Yes?”

“So we’re doing what we want to do anyway because we’re right.”

It says something about Jeff, or maybe about her—or maybe about the both of them—that he’s not even surprised. “Let me guess: your idea.”

“Anderson and I collaborated. Teamwork, Jeff. It’s all about the teamwork.” She’s ready to go, just gotta wait for Kaidan now.

“You know we’ll pretty much definitely get arrested this time, right? I mean I lucked out the first time because I’m awesome but—”

“You don’t have to go,” she says, but she knows he’s gonna go.

He snorts, starts running his fingers over his screen. “It’s all about the teamwork.”

~

Jeff’s not exactly a ‘social’ person. Hell, Shepard’s not either really, she’s just better at it than he is.

“And besides,” she’d said, “we’re probably all gonna die and then get arrested anyway.”

So she’d helped him limp down to the mess hall—harder than usual, thanks to the still busted foot; if they live through this, he can’t wait to get this dumb cast off. It’d started out more like a wake, really; depressing and quiet and nobody much wanted to do anything but have some drinks and write home to mom. But as much as Shepard’s not real good at making friends, she’s great at cheering up the ones she’s already got—and she’s managed to make friends with every single weirdo on this ship (himself included, but that was already a given, so no points for that).

She’d broken out her cards, done a few magic tricks (Tali had been absolutely fucking _delighted_ ), and then, with morale sufficiently raised, she’d started the gambling.

“Nothing like playing for dish duty that you probably won’t live to do,” she’d said. And, _somehow,_ that had actually cheered them all up. Jeff mixed some drinks—which Shepard and Wrex both ignored for straight-from-the-bottle stuff—and Garrus put on some terrible rock/pop fusion garbage and Ashley hustled Kaidan out of all the cookies he had stuffed in the back of the cabinet.

Shepard’s a dirty cheater; she told him once that she’s never won a game of cards honestly in her life “because cards aren’t the game I’m playing, Jeff.” Total bullshit but it also means that when she loses, she loses on purpose. And she lost _a lot_ tonight. A week of dish duty to Garrus and Liara, a bottle of booze to Wrex, some dextro-chocolate to Tali (which is, honestly, probably the only reason she even had something like that to gamble with), lunch at Zakera to Ashley and two favours to Jeff. That’s how he and Shepard play: with favours. They’d stopped playing for anything other than that a long time ago because they both knew there wasn’t much point. Because Shepard cheats.

And when everyone had started dropping off, drunk and happy despite what they were running to, Jeff and Shepard came back up to the cockpit to get a little sleep.

He’s only a little drunk and she’s only a little drunk and now would be a great time to make some sappy, sentimental gesture of friendship and give her the stupid rocket ship keychain because he could blame it on the booze later, assuming this doesn’t all go to shit. _Space is the place, Shepard._

But it’s just one of those goddamn moments.

“Kiss me, Shepard. Kiss me again.”

When she’d first geared up to leave the ship, go groundside with the crew on Therum, he couldn’t even look at her; he felt like he’d jinx it just by telling her to be careful, just by watching her go. But this is different, and they really might die—they _all_ might die, everybody, if this doesn’t work. And he can’t face that without her knowing—

“No.”

He actually laughs, because _damn_. Sure, it’s always been in the back of his mind—that he’s just reading into things, that she’s never really meant—but shit, he hadn’t expected her to be so blunt. “Goddamn, Shepard; no mercy, huh?”

She reaches across the console and runs her fingers through his beard—“Scruff,” she’d called it when he’d starting letting it grow, and she’d laughed at him. “I like it,” she’d said.

“You wanna be with me, we both gotta be around to actually do it, Jeff. Ask me again, after this, if that’s what you want.”

“Don’t die.”

“Deal.”

~

_I didn’t die_ , she thinks. She means to say it but all that comes out is a croak and even that makes her head hurt.

The rest of her feels ok. Mostly.

It’s the light that tells her she’s in the hospital before she’s even completely awake. She takes a second to mentally assess herself, toes and ankles and legs, stomach, chest, arms and ha—she’s squeezing somebody’s hand. They squeeze back.

She opens one eye to see Jeff’s dad sitting on the edge of her bed. She was right about the hospital. “Hey, Pop.”

“Hey, sweetheart. How do you feel?”

God, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed them. Them.

“Is everybody here? Is—”

He tips his head toward the corner of the room, where Gunny and Jeff are both sleeping in chairs. Jeff’s hat is falling off. “Tessa went to talk to someone about the quality of the food.”

Shepard laughs. “Of course she did. And me not even awake to eat it.”

“She couldn’t stand the thought of you waking up to powdered eggs,” he says, shrugging but smiling fondly.

“Shepard?”

She twists her head—ow—and Jeff’s rubbing his face, resituating his hat.

“I’ll give you some privacy,” Marc says, and he gives her hand another quick squeeze before he gets up to leave. Shepard’s got a nagging feeling that things aren’t all that private; this wouldn’t be the first time Gunny’s faked being asleep so she could catch all the good gossip. Smart kid.

“So what’s the word?” she asks him, when Jeff drags his chair over to her bed. “Everybody ok?”

“You fried your amp, you idiot.” He’s not doing a great job of being mad; that’s the most half-assed eye roll she’s ever seen. “Yes. Everybody’s fine. _You’re_ fine, if you care. Just need to take it easy on the biotics for a couple weeks.”

“So... when can I get out of here?”

“You jackass.” He grins so wide, she’s kinda worried. “Tomorrow. You can get back to work tomorrow, whatever that ends up being. You’re gonna just _love_ what the Council’s done with the place, Shep.”

“Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s better than jail.”

The look on his face says it might not be, but honestly, she’s tired and she’ll worry about it later. For now, she’s gonna take full advantage of hospital pillows and whatever kind of food Mom manages to get her. Tessa Moreau could charm the grouch out of a turian.

“Here.” Jeff drops something onto her stomach. “I got you something.”

_Space is the place._ “A keychain. Funny.” Her key isn’t even _on_ it, but it’s cute, in that corny sort of way she secretly really loves. She runs her fingers over it, rocket ship and stars and weird, glittery plastic.

“You think that’s funny, you’re gonna love this: the apartment got crushed. Nothing left but rubble and one _very_ angry landlord.”

It’s not funny, except that it kind of really is. “I’m starting to think it isn’t _me_ the universe is screwing with, Jeff. Starting to think it’s all you.”

He scoots his chair a little closer, takes her hand. “It’s all about the teamwork, Shepard. You and me.”


End file.
